There were times I thought my father was disappointed because he had two sons.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want sons, I think his feelings sprang from his not being able to do enough for us. We lived in an apartment house in the Bronx, where we rubbed shoulders with fathers who owned their own stores or worked in banks. They brought their kids samples of what they sold, such as new beds, the latest clothing or, in the case of the bankers, toasters.

My father sold bras and girdles.

About the only thing he could do for us was teach us what the numbers and letters in 34B meant. That, and remind us that he could get our girlfriends all the bras they needed if we knew their chest and cup sizes. My conversation on first dates could have been the stuff legends were made of, but for a shy teenager my father’s offer was one more reminder that I didn’t even have the self-confidence to bribe my way into a second date.

(I should report that my father could walk into a room and accurately identify the bra sizes of all the women in it. It was a gift that played better with my friends than it did with me.)

What my father did leave me with was a clinical preoccupation with bras, not as objects of sexuality—okay, not entirely—but as objects of creative engineering and historical value.

Please stop snickering.

All this is by way of explanation for the deep sense of loss I felt upon learning that the legendary Frederick’s of Hollywood closed all its stores after going bankrupt for the second time. There’ll be no third time’s a charm for Frederick’s. The business will continue online with its dispensaries of desire, its hallowed halls for the adventurous and prurient reduced to a politically-correct porn website.

Frederick’s, first with its Art Deco purple facade, then later with its downsized corner store and picture windows, was a reassuring presence on Hollywood Boulevard. If I were walking down the street and, by chance, was menaced by a mugger or approached by a highly-tattooed individual, I could always run into Frederick’s and feel safe.

I don’t care how tough you are, there’s no way you’re mugging or hassling anyone when you’re surrounded by see-through bras or panties lacking some strategic bits of fabric. No matter how bad your jones for crack cocaine, emerging from a rack of teddies yelling, “Your money or your life,” will not bring you any closer to a nickel bag.

Frederick Mellinger, the World War II vet who started Frederick’s of Hollywood, was also responsible the most intriguing, and puzzling, invention of my youth. In 1947, Mellinger invented the push-up bra. Or the padded bra. Or both. History is a bit murky on this, mostly because I think men (or women) confuse the two, since a push-up bra naturally has to include some padding.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

While the first wave of Baby Boomers was frittering its time away being born, Mellinger was busy opening Frederick’s Fifth Avenue in New York. It was a mail-order business that sold undergarments designed to the specifications of his Army pals, who told him these were products their girlfriends would like.

And who knows more about what a girlfriend would like than an Army buddy? More than likely it was some sort of foxhole promise. “Lou, if we get out of here I’m going to make you a bra your girlfriend will like.” I suspect he never thought anyone would take him up on it.

Mellinger moved the business to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles a year later. That purple Art Deco building he occupied became a metaphor for the peek-a-boo libido, not to mention the California lifestyle of the 50s and 60s.

As far as I know, my father never dealt in such contraband. He worked for “respectable” firms, which I’m sure Frederick’s was not at the time. He had very little to say to me on the topic of bras and padding. In return, I never asked him whether one could spot the difference between a padded bra and an unpadded one when eyeballing a woman’s bra size. He left me to puzzle over that by myself.

Had he taught me that one little secret, I think I would have stopped pestering him for a new bed.